Leon Reif: A Holocaust Survivor’s Untold Story
Sport journalist Marcel Reif’s father, who was born on July 9, 1914, only barely escaped the Holocaust—and kept it a secret all his life
“Sej a Mensch”—“Be a mensch”—was the advice Leon Reif gave his son, the famous sports journalist Marcel Reif, for life. In the years under German National Socialist rule, Leon experienced firsthand what it means when humanity is trampled on. A Jewish forced laborer from Poland, he had been within a hair’s breadth of being transported to the Belzec extermination camp. All his life, he never said anything about the trauma he suffered—in part because he wanted his children to be able to lead carefree lives in Germany. The Arolsen Archives have documents in their holdings that help retrace his life story.
“We were blessed with a chubby-cheeked, happy, relaxed, fun, and affectionate childhood and youth, unburdened and free of care,” Marcel Reif said in an interview with the Bayerischer Rundfunk in 2024. His Jewish father had never talked about what he experienced during the Nazi era. And Marcel had never asked, in part for fear of learning something unbearable. It was not until many years after Leon’s death in 1994 that the sports journalist’s mother finally broke the silence.
Leon Reif was born on July 9, 1914, in Boryslav, a small town in the Northern Carpathians. Situated in the historical region of Galicia near Lviv, which at the time was known as Lemberg and belonged to Austro-Hungary, Boryslav became a part of the re-established Polish state after World War I. In the nineteenth century, the region had evolved into a hub of the petroleum industry. This rapidly growing sector attracted workers and businesspeople, including many Jewish families. The Reifs, a family of six, were among them.
Deportation to the Belzec extermination camp
When World War II began in 1939, approximately 14,000 Jews lived in the region, which had come under Soviet occupation as a consequence of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin. At that point in time, Leon—or Leib (meaning “lion”) in Yiddish—was a fun-loving 25-year-old. His father Natan had a furniture factory, and he himself worked as a cabinetmaker. Three years later, the Germans occupied Boryslav. Hundreds of Jewish men were arrested and shot to death or deported.
In the summer of 1942, the SS deported thousands to the nearby Belzec extermination camp. On arrival, they sent them straight from the cattle cars to the gas chambers. Leon and his siblings were also on the train. But then a man about Leon’s age came to their aid. It was Berthold Beitz, the commercial director of the Karpaten Oel company, who took the SS on the platform to task. Unafraid of their drawn weapons, he declared: “I need these people here for work that is vital to the war effort, and if you prevent me from taking them with me, you’ll have hell to pay for it!” After the war, Leon told the story to his young wife Lucie, and decades later she told it to her son Marcel. Today Berthold Beitz is known above all for his role as an influential post-war industrialist.
Years as a forced laborer
Leon performed forced labor for the German Karpaten Oel company and lived in the company camp. His father and his brother Leiser also turn up on lists of the company’s laborers. Copies of these lists are held by the Arolsen Archives, they are a record of the Jews working in the refinery in November 1943. The circumstances of their lives there are uncertain. It is a known fact, however, that Beitz—who would later become the chief representative of the Krupp company—protected many of them from murder in the gas chambers.
In March 1944, Beitz was called up for military service. In the camp, the Gestapo went on the rampage. “The working conditions in the camp were very harsh. We worked for 12 hours and got two meals a day…. Extermination measures were carried out against those unfit for work,” a former forced laborer wrote in an International Tracing Service (ITS; today Arolsen Archives) questionnaire. In July/August 1944, as the Soviet troops approached, the forced labor camp was evacuated and the majority of the remaining Jewish forced laborers deported to the Krakow-Plaszow and Auschwitz camps.
Once again, Leon managed to avoid deportation, presumably by hiding in the forest. In an article in Die Zeit in 2023, his son Marcel recalls: “When he and a group of Jews fled to the forest to escape the Germans, they had to leave everything behind. However, my father took a little boy with him on his shoulders. With a heavy heart, they left another boy behind with some Polish peasants. After the liberation, they went back to pick up the boy.” But the boy was dead. Most of Leon’s relatives, including his father Natan, his mother, and his brothers were also dead. Only his sister survived.
After the war
After the war, Leon initially made a new home for himself in Waldenburg—now Wałbrzych—in Silesia. He married Lucie, a Catholic woman from that region. They had two children—first Marcel in 1949, then Eva. Anti-Semitism still existed in post-war Poland. In the mid-1950s, the family emigrated to Israel, but just a year later they came back to Europe and settled in Germany, the country of the perpetrators. Leon worked for the American forces in Kaiserslautern.
Leon Reif was a cheerful and affectionate father, Marcel remembers in a ZDF documentary of 2021. He kept the past away from the family, even though it often caught up with him, causing paralyzing bouts of depression. Marcel Reif does not hold his father’s silence against him. On the contrary, as he stressed in his address to the Bundestag as part of the 2024 memorial service for the victims of National Socialism: “He said everything and passed everything on that was important to him, what he had saved as the essence of his experiences. And he often gave us this sentence—now as an admonition, now as a warning, now as advice or as a rebuke. Just three words in the warm Yiddish I so miss: “Sei a Mensch!”—“Be a mensch!”